Short answer: the qualitative fieldwork industry consolidated, and the buyer-side ritual that was supposed to protect you from overpaying did not update. If your procurement process collects three competing quotes for focus group facilities and recruitment, there is a real chance that two of them resolve to the same owner. You can check this yourself in one command, and the check takes about four seconds: resolve the vendor's domain and see where it lands.
Two of the best-known names in US qualitative fieldwork demonstrate the point. Type schlesingergroup.com into a browser and you arrive at sago.com. Type focuspointeglobal.com and you arrive at sago.com as well - carrying a tracking parameter that names itself, focuspointeglobal_domredirect_homepage. Three brands, one destination.
This piece maps who actually owns what in 2026, explains why the consolidation is invisible at the point of purchase, and gives you a repeatable test that works on any vendor category.
What happened to the fieldwork market
The consolidation is documented, and it is not a secret - it is simply not present at the moment you are comparing quotes.
Schlesinger Group acquired Focus Pointe Global on 1 November 2019, including its 1.6 million double opt-in B2C and healthcare panel, bringing together two of the largest US facility networks. In 2022, Reed Cundiff was appointed CEO, and the combined business rebranded as Sago, announced 1 March 2023, aligning the brand with what the company described as 57 years of transformation.
Executive Chairman Steve Schlesinger framed it in the announcement: "This is not merely a name change; it's a commitment to an inspiring new chapter in optimizing our offerings and simplifying research." Cundiff added that the rebrand "underscores our focus on speed, action and simplicity - research experts delivering global audiences and adaptive solutions through advanced research technology."
Both statements are accurate. Neither is written for the person about to request three competing bids.
This is what the ESOMAR Global Market Research 2025 report means when it describes the sector in exactly these terms: market research "reflected the characteristics of a mature and consolidated industry, expanding by 4.8%," while research software grew 11.5% and reporting 8%. Slow growth in a mature category is what produces roll-ups. The $56 billion traditional market research sector is consolidating while the $62 billion software sector expands.
Who owns what in 2026
| Brand | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Sago | Parent brand | Formerly Schlesinger Group; rebrand announced 1 March 2023 |
| Schlesinger Group | Absorbed into Sago | Domain redirects to sago.com |
| Focus Pointe Global | Absorbed into Sago | Acquired 1 Nov 2019; domain redirects to sago.com |
| Civicom | Independent | 25+ years; online-first qualitative |
| Fieldwork | Independent | Facility network |
| L&E Research | Independent | Facility network |
| Adler Weiner | Independent | Facility network |
| Murray Hill National | Independent | Facility network |
Sago's platform stack - Methodify, QualBoard, and QualMeeting - reflects the same pattern one level down: technology brands acquired or built and retained as distinct products under a single owner.
Civicom is the most substantial genuinely independent alternative and is worth knowing properly. It has run online-first qualitative for over 25 years, and its stack is unusually complete: CyberFacility for online IDIs and focus groups, CCam focus for HD 360-degree recording in in-person environments, ChatterBox for online communities and bulletin boards, CiviSelect for recruitment, TranscriptionWing for transcription, See Me Navigate for remote usability testing, Quillit for AI-assisted qualitative analysis, and online mock jury services. It states HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA and PIPEDA compliance - relevant if you field healthcare or EU studies.
The independent facility networks above all still operate under their own ownership as of this writing. That is precisely why the check matters: the answer changes, and it changes without announcement to you.
The test: resolve the domain
Here is the reusable instrument, and its value is that it requires no industry knowledge and no vendor cooperation.
curl -sIL -o /dev/null -w "%{url_effective}\n" https://www.schlesingergroup.com/
A 301 redirect is a durable, public record of a corporate event. Press releases get archived and forgotten; trade-press coverage falls behind paywalls; the acquiring company's About page eventually stops mentioning the acquired brand at all. The redirect outlives all of it, because the acquirer has a commercial interest in keeping it working - they bought the traffic along with the company.
Run it across every vendor on a shortlist before you compare their numbers. When two rows land on the same host, you have not collected two quotes. You have collected one quote twice.
The generalisation is worth stating, because it applies well beyond fieldwork: to check whether a vendor category consolidated, resolve its competitors' domains. It works on research panels, on martech, on agencies, on anything that grew by acquisition. It is the cheapest due diligence available and almost nobody runs it.
Why nobody tells you
It is important to be precise here, because the failure is structural rather than dishonest.
Sago is not concealing anything. The acquisition was announced publicly, the rebrand was announced publicly, and operating multiple distinct brands with real, separately located facilities is entirely ordinary corporate practice. The facilities exist. The recruiters exist. Nobody is inventing a competitor.
The problem is that no party in the transaction has both the knowledge and the incentive to tell you.
- The vendor knows, but is under no obligation to volunteer that a firm you also contacted shares its parent. It is answering the question you asked, which was about its own capabilities and price.
- Your procurement team has the incentive but not the knowledge. Its policy says "obtain three quotes," and it received three quotes on three letterheads.
- The researcher commissioning the work knows the brands as they existed when they last bought fieldwork, which may have been several ownership changes ago.
So the check nobody runs is the one everybody assumed somebody else had run. The three-quote rule silently assumes that three brands are three counterparties, and brand identity stopped tracking corporate identity somewhere around 2019. The rule keeps producing a number that looks like a market rate, and the number is not wrong so much as unsupported - it was triangulated against a single party.
This has a practical consequence beyond price. If your risk register lists "vendor concentration" and your mitigation is "we use multiple fieldwork suppliers," that mitigation may be nominal. One operational incident at one parent company can affect what you believed were independent suppliers.
What to do instead
- Resolve every shortlisted vendor's domain before comparing bids. Four seconds each. Add the result to the bid comparison sheet as a column.
- Ask directly, in writing: "Who is your ultimate parent company, and which other research brands does it own?" This is a normal question and a reputable vendor will answer it plainly.
- Treat your three quotes as N quotes, where N is the number of distinct parents. If N is 1, you have a single-source procurement and should say so.
- Check the panel behind the recruit, not just the facility. Consolidation at the panel layer is less visible than at the facility layer and matters more for sample quality. See how to choose a sample provider using ESOMAR 37 and river sampling vs panels.
- Ask what share of the recruit comes from the same panel across your "different" vendors. Shared panels produce shared respondents, which is how professional respondents and panel conditioning creep into studies you believed were independent.
- Price the alternative. The strongest negotiating position with any fieldwork vendor is a credible ability to not need them, which is a genuine change from a decade ago.
If you are running the fieldwork rather than buying it, see participant recruitment platforms for the self-serve marketplaces - which are a different category from the full-service agencies covered here, with different economics and no facility component - and how to recruit user research participants for the practical work. For the budget arithmetic, how much a focus group costs covers the recruitment multiplier that drives most of the invoice.
Where Koji fits
The reason vendor consolidation has this much leverage over your budget is that traditional qualitative research is a logistics business. Facilities, recruiters, schedulers, moderators, and transcriptionists are physical capacity, and physical capacity consolidates. When it does, your options narrow whether or not anyone tells you.
Koji removes the dependency rather than renegotiating it.
- AI-moderated voice and text interviews run asynchronously with your own customers, prospects, and churned users - no facility, no scheduler, no panel intermediary between you and the person answering.
- Automatic thematic analysis across every transcript, so you are not buying analysis hours from the same parent company that sold you the recruit.
- Six structured question types - open_ended, scale, single_choice, multiple_choice, ranking, and yes_no - so one study yields both verbatim explanation and countable distributions. See structured questions.
- Customizable AI consultants that carry your brief and probe consistently across every conversation, with no moderator bias and none of the group effects documented in focus group advantages and disadvantages.
- One-click reports the same day the last interview lands - from question to insight in hours, not weeks, with no research expertise required.
Sago, Civicom, and the independent facility networks are good at what they do, and there are studies - in-person product handling, sensory work, live group dynamics - where a facility is genuinely the right answer. But for the large majority of research questions that only require talking to enough of the right people and reading what they said carefully, the facility was always incidental. Legacy providers like UserTesting, Qualtrics, and dscout kept the logistics model and put software on top of it. Koji is AI-native: 10x faster insights, and a supply chain with one link in it.
Find out what your customers say when nobody's parent company is in the middle. Start your first Koji study free.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Schlesinger Group the same company as Sago?
Yes. Schlesinger Group rebranded as Sago, with the change announced on 1 March 2023 under CEO Reed Cundiff, who was appointed in November 2022. The rebrand followed years of acquisitions, and the company described it as aligning the brand with 57 years of transformation. The schlesingergroup.com domain now redirects to sago.com, which is the simplest way to verify the relationship yourself.
What happened to Focus Pointe Global?
Schlesinger Group acquired Focus Pointe Global on 1 November 2019, including its 1.6 million double opt-in B2C and healthcare panel. Focus Pointe Global subsequently became part of Sago through the 2023 rebrand. Its domain, focuspointeglobal.com, now redirects to the Sago homepage with a tracking parameter that explicitly identifies the redirect.
Which qualitative fieldwork agencies are still independent?
As of this writing, Civicom, Fieldwork, L&E Research, Adler Weiner, and Murray Hill National operate under their own ownership. Civicom is the most established online-first independent, with over 25 years in the market and a full stack including CyberFacility, ChatterBox, CiviSelect, TranscriptionWing, and Quillit for AI-assisted analysis. Ownership changes without notice to buyers, so verify before each procurement cycle rather than relying on a list.
How do I check whether two research vendors share a parent company?
Resolve each vendor's domain and follow the redirects. A single command - curl -sIL -o /dev/null -w "%{url_effective}\n" https://www.example.com/ - returns the final destination. If two shortlisted vendors land on the same host, they share an owner. A redirect is a durable public record of an acquisition and typically outlasts the press release, because the acquirer maintains it to preserve inbound traffic. Also ask each vendor directly, in writing, to name its ultimate parent.
Does vendor consolidation actually affect research quality?
It can, in two specific ways. First, shared panels behind nominally different vendors reduce the independence of your samples and increase exposure to professional respondents and panel conditioning. Second, apparent supplier diversity in a risk register may be nominal, so a single operational incident can affect suppliers you believed were independent. Consolidation does not automatically lower quality - large groups often invest more in compliance and technology - but it does invalidate the assumption that using several brands gives you several independent sources.
Do I still need a fieldwork agency in 2026?
For in-person product handling, sensory testing, and research that genuinely depends on live group interaction, a facility remains the right tool. For the majority of qualitative questions - understanding motivation, objections, switching triggers, or reactions to a concept - asynchronous AI-moderated interviews reach the same people without facilities, scheduling, or panel intermediaries, at a fraction of the cost and on a timeline measured in days. The practical test is whether your question requires participants to be physically present or merely to be candid.
